Unlocking The Economic Values of a Centralised Building Energy Database

Building energy data has been used for decades to understand energy flows in buildings and plan for future energy demand. Recent market, technology and policy drivers have resulted in widespread data collection by stakeholders across the buildings industry. Consolidation of independently collected and maintained datasets presents a cost-effective opportunity to build a database of unprecedented size. Applications of the data include peer group analysis to evaluate building performance and data-driven algorithms that use empirical data to estimate energy savings associated with building retrofits and many other uses. This paper discusses the potential economic drivers and benefits from the collection of energy data and provides a glimpse on how it could be achieved. The collection and disclosure of building energy data should provide the potential economic multipliers that could exists from the analysis of such data to create new economic opportunities and employment.